The Leg (1982)

For those unaware, this is a long-form article by the renowned (late) neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks about his personal mental and emotional experiences of what it was like to not feel his leg.

The piece is much more of a New Yorker style than a Paul Graham style. Enjoy it for what it is!

With so many references to Hume, Hobbes, Leibniz, and others, I find the lack of appeal to Descartes odd: "Extension in length, breadth and depth constitutes the nature of corporeal substance" (AT VIIIA 25, CSM I 210). Our author considers his leg "no longer part of anything...Nothing and Nowhere" and yet he still "[regards] the leg as ‘a thing’." The notion of thingness and nothingness stand in mutually destructive opposition. His leg may have the property of nothingness from the persective of his Humean chain of perceptions, but how can one hold both observations simultaneously? It must be resolved through the words of Descartes: "nothing else but thinking substance itself and extended substance itself, that is, mind and body" (AT VIIIA 30–31, CSM I 215). Our author's leg has lost all mind qualities, and the body-qualities of shape and extension that remain are too novel to be reconciled with his former state of being.

Wow, that was a weird experience. Fantastically well-written. Is this syndrome common?

I liked the bit about him wanting to watch his own surgery. I needed surgery on my hand and was ecstatic that the doc was going to do it under local. He was warmly amused by my requests to see inside my own hand.

> My journal became, not only the repository of my secret confidences, but the ideal friend who would hear and understand me, who would listen – and answer.

YMMV, but I also find journaling an excellent way to get perspective on things that happen. It often helps me to spell out the subtle thoughts and hidden feelings, because that provides a way to acknowledge, confront and answer them.

Jeeze, brains are just unimaginably weird.